Decline Why 95% of the "modern" cRPG are so lame?

[rusty_shackleford]

95% of all video games are trash, regardless of the year they released in
I'd go so far as to say this applies to nearly every medium

 

[prengle]

i was concerned i would never get to see cleve fucking go ham on the codex again in my lifetime, but now i have a slightly bigger sliver of hope for the future of mankind

 

[Darth Canoli]

CoD = Call of Duty. One of the best examples of a game designed to be played with one hand on a controller and one hand in a bag of cheezypuffs, but it is the prettiest and the dude-bro-iest so it sells a zillion copies. Zenimax wanna be that.

Seriously?
"Brings controllers and Call of Duty out of the blue in a cRPG discussion"
Your tag isn't going anywhere, i guess.

 

[anvi]

CoD = Call of Duty. One of the best examples of a game designed to be played with one hand on a controller and one hand in a bag of cheezypuffs, but it is the prettiest and the dude-bro-iest so it sells a zillion copies. Zenimax wanna be that.

Seriously?
"Brings controllers and Call of Duty out of the blue in a cRPG discussion"
Your tag isn't going anywhere, i guess.

What? I am talking about how gamers today don't distinguish between CoD and anything else. Did you even read my post?

 

[Lilura]

Because they were much cheaper to make in the 90s when people could handle isometric views and stuff. Nowadays everything gets compared to Call of Duty and Battlefield and whatever else, so every game needs fancy graphics which is expensive.

32 colors is too much. Only need 16 max. Or not even that. I guess someone will post B&W wireframe screencap.

8 bit era was pretty much free of graphics whores.

 

[Wysardry]

Moraff's World could be run in two colour mode IIRC.

I also vaguely remember a couple of text-based RPGs.

 

[Gastrick]

Stendhal probably self-nuked his account before jumping out of his bedroom's window.

Is the first part of the sentence how it happened Infinitron? If so that's pretty funny.

 

[Burning Bridges]

this is actually a known medical condition

Stendhal's syndrome is a psychosomatic condition involving rapid heartbeat, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations,[1] allegedly occurring when individuals become exposed to objects, artworks, or phenomena of great beauty.

A more recent account of the Stendhal syndrome was in 2018, where a visitor to the Uffizi Gallery in Florence suffered a heart attack while admiring Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus.

what "objects of great beauty" Stendhal could have been exposed to remains a mystery, but his confusion was palpable

 

[retinoid]

Changing trends among consumers and lower margins for devs/publishers. It's not the 90s/early 00s anymore. Publishers are very careful in what projects they undertake and extensively research which gameplay/story trends sell and which do not. You are never going to see innovative or risky decisions in RPGs from big publishers for this reason; those days are long gone. Up until Cyberpunk I would have said most gamers were tolerant of the illusion of choice most "RPGs" gave you over real choices that had ramifications in the game world, but that seems to have changed post release. Now there's a ton criticism towards CDPR and the concept of "fake choices". It seems to have opened up discussion of the topic among mainstream players, so hopefully that trend dies out soon. Publishers want the path of least resistance to profit, so if criticism towards games with fake choices is popular we can expect a changing paradigm from big publishers to follow suit.

But we all know most of the innovation is done by indie studios with small teams and focused visions. They have the freedom to do whatever they want, in a genre that sorely needs this level freedom and creativity in the dev process. Hardcore CRPGs are seen as a niche among most people who play games, and sadly they sell like niche games too.

Spoiler

DOS2 is not a CRPG, don't fucking @me.

 

[Assisted Living Godzilla]

I want to say Telltale Games killed that whole "illusion of choice" thing when the dummies that loved their shit realized what was going on. People loved that Walking Dead game for whatever reason, but by the time they were doing that Batman game and the last Walking Dead a few years ago people seemed over them, and one of the factors was how much nothing you do in a Telltale Game matters. I'm sure the beating Fallout 4 took helped that along too. Actually kind of surprised Cyberpunk tried getting away with it now.

 

[samuraigaiden]

What are the good 5% and how did they get made? THAT is what's important.

 

[buffalo bill]

Aristotle can help clarify

material cause: ultimately constituted by bad programming (in some sense)
formal cause: content consists of bad gameplay
final cause: has the purpose of being bad entertainment for lame people
efficient cause: product of bad development processes

 

[Momock]

Aristotle can help clarify

material cause: ultimately constituted by bad programming (in some sense)
formal cause: content consists of bad gameplay
final cause: has the purpose of being bad entertainment for lame people
efficient cause: product of bad development processes

Wouldn't it be more like:

material cause: ...
formal cause: bad game/level/art design
final cause: being incloooosiiiive!
efficient cause: sloppy/lazy programmers

?

 

[buffalo bill]

Aristotle can help clarify

material cause: ultimately constituted by bad programming (in some sense)
formal cause: content consists of bad gameplay
final cause: has the purpose of being bad entertainment for lame people
efficient cause: product of bad development processes

Wouldn't it be more like:

material cause: ...
formal cause: bad game/level/art design
final cause: being incloooosiiiive!
efficient cause: sloppy/lazy programmers

?

Isn't that pretty much what I said? I'm thinking that the material cause for any software is the code that it is constituted by, just like e.g. the material cause of a desk is wood. Asking "why is the game the way it is?" one could answer with the material cause (though it's obviously not a very informative answer tbh)

 

[Momock]

The only material thing in vidya is the hardware that makes them run (maybe can we say that consoles are bad material that limits the potential of the games?). The code is purely coders ability/thought, it's either formal or efficient cause.

Maybe.

I think.

 

[buffalo bill]

The only material thing in vidya is the hardware that makes them run (maybe can we say that consoles are bad material that limits the potential of the games?). The code is purely coders ability/thought, it's either formal or efficient cause.

Maybe.

I think.

I think by that reasoning the only material cause of anything is fundamental physics. I was thinking that higher level entities can be material causes in the Aristotle sense, but tbh the whole four causes thing is pretty wishy washy imo (I was just joking with it obv)

 

[TheDeveloperDude]

95% of all video games are trash, regardless of the year they released in
I'd go so far as to say this applies to nearly every medium

Yes, dumb like Ultima 5

 

[Denim Destroyer]

Sturgeon's Law (from Wikipedia)

Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap". It was coined by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic, and was inspired by his observation that, while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, most work in other fields was low-quality too, and so science fiction was no different.